Toast points

• Joey Votto has won the Lou Marsh Trophy. A panel of journalists deemed the Reds first baseman to be Canada’s standout athlete of 2017 earlier today, rewarding the Toronto-raised slugger for a season in which he finished second in the National League MVP voting. Votto batted .320 with a .454 OBP and 36 home runs in 162 games this season.

• Canada’s world junior selection camp got underway today in St. Catharines, Ont., just across the U.S. border from Buffalo, the host of the Dec. 26-Jan. 5 tournament. Head coach Dominique Ducharme will put 33 players — 18 forwards, 11 defencemen and four goalies — through four days of training before slimming the ranks to a final roster of 22. Seven of those players were part of the Canadian team that finished second at the world juniors in Toronto and Montreal last year.

• Major-league baseball umpire Dale Scott announced his retirement late yesterday. The 58-year-old had become the most obvious example of the concussion effects that come from getting hit with foul balls behind the plate. The last blow he took was on April 14 at the Rogers Centre on a foul ball by Baltimore’s Mark Trumbo. Scott left that game and didn’t return for the rest of the season. Doctors told him the more he subjected himself to blows to the head, the more risk he ran for trouble down the road.

Scott was a crew chief for 16 of his 32 seasons, worked 3,897 regular-season games and received three World Series assignments. He was also the home plate umpire for Game 5 of the 2015 American League Division Series between the Blue Jays and Texas Rangers, known for the Russell Martin throw that ricocheted off the bat of Shin Soo Choo and the legendary Jose Bautista bat flip.

Dale Scott, in an August 2013 file photo.Elaine Thompson /
AP

• The IOC has retroactively disqualified Russia’s women’s hockey team from the 2014 Sochi Olympics for doping offences involving six players. The decision strikes Russia’s sixth-place finish in that tournament from the record books. The six implicated players have been barred from the games for life, raising the number of Russian Olympians banned for doping at Sochi to 31.

The disqualification was announced hours after the Russian Olympic Committee confirmed it would allow its athletes to participate as neutrals at the Pyeongchang Games, forgoing any possibility of a boycott. ROC president Alexander Zhukov said he expects “potentially more than 200 athletes” to compete, though it remains to be seen if the IOC will let women’s hockey players contribute to that tally.

• Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey preparations continue this week when Hockey Canada ices a team at the Channel One Cup in Moscow. Canada’s first game is tomorrow morning against South Korea.

Canada’s Olympic team, which will be comprised mostly of pros playing in European leagues, is using these European tournaments to make its roster decisions. Ben Scrivens, who is playing for Ufa in the KHL, will again be the No. 1 goalie. Canada’s roster for the event has 19 players from KHL teams, including Wojtek Wolski, Matt Frattin, Linden Vey, P.A. Parenteau, Max Talbot, Teddy Purcell, Chris Lee and Simon Despres. Canada has only won the event once, back in 1987 when it was called the Izvestia Trophy.

• Legendary kick and punt returner Devin Hester announced his retirement from pro football today. The four-time Pro Bowler holds the NFL record for punt return touchdowns (14) and total return TDs (20), six of which came in his rookie season with the Bears in 2006. Hester, 35, led the league in kickoff return yardage as a Bear in 2013 and with the Falcons in 2014, but hadn’t played since he appeared in 12 games for the Ravens last season.

• Instrumental national anthems are the best, and the New York Rangers gave fans at Madison Square Garden a treat on Monday night from 10-year-old Zoe Nguyen.

Even the hard hockey men preparing to smash into each other were charmed by her awkward conclusion.

Nutritional analysis

With the election of Jack Morris to the Baseball Hall of Fame by one of the committees that takes a second look at players once they are no longer eligible to be considered by the baseball writers’ annual vote, Blue Jays fans are rightly squawking about the candidacy of Dave Stieb. Stieb has become one of the players whose career achievements are cast in a more glowing light now that we have the tools to more objectively compare players beyond their basic statistics like wins, which has been debunked as a measure of a pitcher’s value.

Morris’s 254 wins is one of the stats held up by his proponents. Stieb, who pitched two fewer seasons, only had 176. Morris pitched more than 900 more innings than Stieb and had 800 more strikeouts. Morris was the ace of the 1984 World Series-winning Tigers, and had a signature performance, his 10-inning shutout in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series for Minnesota.

Since 2011, the website Hall of Stats has published its list of players who ought to be in the Hall of Fame based on a formula that takes into account Baseball-Reference’s Wins Above Replacement calculation and Wins Above Average. In that measure, Morris receives a career score of 77, where 100 is the cutoff for inclusion in the pantheon on elites. Morris is ranked 199th out of the 222 players currently in the Hall of Fame. Stieb’s score is 115.

WAR as a stat has been getting a hard look by the analytics community over the past couple of months based on some criticisms by Bill James. And Baseball-Reference’s flavour of WAR certainly values Stieb (57.0) more than Morris (43.8). Oddly, Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus like Morris much more than Stieb. Fangraphs gives Morris the edge 55.8 to 43.8 and Baseball Prospectus’s WARP stat credits Morris with 64.3 against Stieb’s 50.0.

The Modern Era committee, which elected Morris and Alan Trammell on Sunday, meets again in 2019. With two players off the list, will Stieb get one of those spots for consideration?

Photo of the day

The Patriots were thisclose to clinching their ninth straight AFC East title last night. Instead, an early deficit and an insufficient fourth-quarter comeback attempt doomed them to a 27-20 loss to the Dolphins, New England’s first defeat since Oct. 1.

The Pats are still three games clear of the rest of their division at 10-3, setting up a scrumptious showdown with the Steelers (11-2) in Pittsburgh next Sunday. Miami (6-7), meanwhile, stayed within a game of the AFC’s second wild-card spot, although four teams are ahead of them in that race.

New England Patriots receiver Danny Amendola comes up short of the end zone against the Miami Dolphins on Dec. 11.Mike Ehrmann /
Getty Images

At nationalpost.com

• Canada’s world junior hockey team won’t feature a Crosby- or McDavid-like star this year. Indeed, writes Michael Traikos, the average fan probably won’t recognize most of the players Ducharme picks for his final roster — a scenario that bodes well for Michael McLeod, the speedy, energetic New Jersey Devils prospect who could become a household name in a matter of weeks.

• Olympic athletes will generally try anything within the rules of their discipline that helps them win. (And, in the case of a certain Cold War power, anything outside the rules, too.) Still, it was strange when Norwegian speed skaters turned up to the first World Cup event of the season a few weeks ago in blue uniforms, rather than their country’s trademark red. This wasn’t a fashion statement, reports The New York Times’ Andrew Keh. Norway is convinced that blue is the faster colour.

Bill Buford spoke about moving to Lyon with his family for a year to write Dirt, and then staying five, about their lives now in New York, and the future ...

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